They have a very slick and professional looking webpage. Is it weird that that makes me wary? I’m used to the best distros having webpages that look like a wiki or a professor’s website.
So, its not surprising they made an effort to make a nice looking webpage, design work is basically the only thing they are doing.
I found that Linux mint desktop environment is the best of both world, zorin a bit behind then everything else.
I think the people who have the hardest time are those who think they know what they’re doing so feel they need to change things.
I’ve never seen a beginner at anything start digging through settings wildly, and experienced people know what they want to change. It’s that middle ground.
If you look at modern yet established distros, I struggle to find the outliers that don't have professional looking, slick web pages. See all the *buntus, Fedora, Elementary OS, Cachy OS, Bazzite, Endeavour, Manjaro, Linux Mint, and so forth.
To me, and of course this is personal, Debian website looks pretty professional in an enterprise-y kind of way. I quite like it.
But then again, it's one example. Hell, even OpenSUSE's website looks super slick and modern.
It’s the root example, of which many of the examples of your list are derived from. Debian is the daddy.
Update: It is a product. To get themes/configurations more palatable to former Windows and Mac users, you need to pay $48 https://zorin.com/os/pro/
What it does well compared to websites of the same bunch is that it has good contrast for text. Not the obnoxious light gray on white.
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/verbing-nouns/6838872....
At this point Linux is stable and works and is reliable. It just usually looks jankey.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the zorin desktop experience reminded me of a professional OS.
Solaris is dying, Irix last release was in 2006, is nowhere to be seen, all that is left is AIX and HP-UX but their available desktops are the very same you find on Linux and the BSDs
It’s a brochure website.
I'd argue many older and more simplistic landing pages look way better than their current equivalents.
"Looks like a wiki or a professors web page" is not "bad landing page", it's "aesthetic that is not the mainstream aesthetic". We're not talking about "things don't line up", we're talking about functional.
And frankly, if I see that someone pointedly doesn't vibe-code their landing page, that's a good sign that they're not phoning in the rest of the work, too.
That depends upon your definition of a good landing page. Personally, I will pay more attention to a Linux distribution if the landing page has information that is valuable to the community. If it looks like they are trying to sell something, I will just move on. In a way, I treat caring about the details as a bad sign (though I realize that I am just prioritizing a different set of details).
Do you see the irony there?
If something is a cheap template or just vibe-coded slop, it denotes precisely that someone doesn't care about detail. It's exactly for those style-over-substance people that these tools exist!
That's not to say that a dated, perfunctory, or poor attempt might not suggest a lack of interest in detail itself, or at least a lack of personal insignt for user experience. It could, but vibe coding delivers no cheat around that. It just writes it in big bold letters.
Two things that come to mind are: hard to use on a small device, and maybe no good quickstart info (like a bad readme).
The point of polishing these details isn't to indicate how much you labored away at the details but rather that the utility to the end-user was important enough to you to lift your finger.
Whether you spend 10 hours making it mobile friendly, contract it out to someone, or ask an LLM to do it isn't the important part.